R Aravamudan, writes on the first success of ISRO launched satellites

Aravamudan in vest and APJ Abdul Kalam preparing a payload inside the church building in Thumba Kerala 1964Finally Dday arrived on 10 August 1979 a good five years after the date that Sarabhai had originally proposed The SLV 3 was assembled for flight on the pad Kalam used to define the very act of bringing the assembled vehicle on to the launch pad as 50 per cent success He would go on to assign success percentages to various events like the takeoff firststage function secondstage function and so on till the actual injection into orbit of the satelliteThe launch was scheduled for the early morning on 10 August 1979 And a few minutes after the vehicle took off it crashed into the Bay of Bengal Our first attempt at launching a satellite launch vehicle was unsuccessful Kalam would often say a noble leader would take the onus of failure on himself and give the credit for success to his subordinates And now this was precisely what Dhawan did He never once blamed Kalam or his team for the failure during the press conferences which followedOn analysis it was found that the loss of control was due to the failure of the reaction control thruster system an undetected leak had drained it of the control fluids We put our heads down and set to work on another attemptIndira Gandhi flanked by Vasanth Gowariker and Satish Dhawan right after a successful SLVacircu00c2u0080u00c2u0088launch 1980Brahm Prakash who headed VSSC during the years leading to the first attempted launch of SLV3 retired in 1979 However he continued as a member of the Space Commission The task of seeing the SLV3 project through and steering VSSC now fell on Vasanth Gowariker We had all got used to the gentle and benevolent presence of Brahm Prakash who was almost a father figure both in age and stature It took us a little while to restore the momentum of workThe second SLV3 launch was scheduled on 18 July 1980 almost a year after the first one The payload was Rohini 1 a satellite weighing 40 kg The mood was very tense this time around and not just because of the launchAravamudan and wife Gita with President Kalam at Rashtrapati Bhawan in 2007Sanjay Gandhi had died in a plane crash just a month ago even as we were putting the finishing touches to our vehicle He had been trying out some acrobatic manoeuvres in his training aircraft Delhi was in chaos as Indira Gandhi tried to come to terms with the loss In Trivandrum and SHAR this had a trickledown effect but we were determined to go ahead with our launchThis time Dhawan had decided to allow Doordarshan to telecast the launch The press was still not to be allowed inside until after the event Since Doordarshan was not yet equipped to do a live telecast some engineers from SAC had come up with an ingenious idea They had tethered a huge balloon with a transponder halfway between SHAR and Madras Gummidipoondi was the chosen location for the balloon which floated at a height of about 1 km above ground A long strong cable secured it firmly to the ground The distance as the crow flies from SHAR was about 80 km Experts from TIFRs balloon facility at Hyderabad had been roped in for this projectYash Pal and I were to do the commentary inhouse Gita had also been invited to join us and ask questions from a laypersons point of view and so she came with me from Trivandrum for this historic launch We had left our small kids with Gitas parents in Bangalore They were very excited at the prospect of seeing their parents live on TV Bangalore still didnt have TV coverage in those days and so their grandparents had arranged to watch the launch at the house of a friend who had rigged up an extrapowerful antenna to catch Madras Doordarshans telecastEverything was ready and the nervousness was palpable The press at the gates had been baying for information for over three days Inside during one of the meetings a senior scientist doodled loops and a crash on his notepad and remarked to his neighbour As long as the rocket doesnt take the trajectory of Sanjay Gandhis plane well be fine Yash Pal Gita and I were rehearsing our questions the previous day when we heard some bad news The blimp had flown off This kind of balloon was usually used in events like carnivals which took place in areas where there was a benign breeze that created just a gentle oscillationNo one had accounted for the strong winds which roared through Gummidipoondi and wrenched the balloon off its tether Nothing could be done about it as the launch was scheduled for the next day at dawn We decided to record the commentary and rush it to Madras by roadThe launch had its moment of nailbiting suspense A few minutes prior to takeoff the command was given to detach the umbilical cable from the rocket There are two types of umbilical cables connecting the rocket to the ground One set comes off automatically during takeoff and the other set which is much heavier is detached remotely with an electrical command The remotecontrolled cable just refused to come off For a few minutes no one knew what to do Obviously the launch could not take place with a stuck cable so we had to call a HoldThe vehicle was fully armed and it was quite unsafe for anyone to venture near The saviour of the day was a technician named Bapiah He volunteered to climb up the launch tower and manually coax the cable off The tower was around 60 ft high which was about the same height as the rocket We had no other option but to let him try with the safety officials turning their backs for a short while Bapiah quickly climbed the tower and gave the cable a hefty kick and it mercifully came off The rest of course is history The flight was a maiden success a milestone in ISROs historyAnd so on 18 July 1980 almost seventeen years after the first foreign NikeApache sounding rocket was launched from TERLS a madeinIndia rocket launched from Indian soil injected an Indianmade satellite into a 300 km by 900 km orbit It was an ecstatic moment Kalam was hoisted on the shoulders by his colleagues In Trivandrum we were all welcomed as heroes when we stepped off the planeExcerpted with permission from ISRO A personal History by R Aaravamudan and Geeta Aravamudan published by Harper Collins